A recent column in the Irish Times by Justine McCarthy was headlined: ‘We should thank Charles Haughey for Ireland’s Booker Prize success.’ McCarthy wrote: ‘To explore the critical success of Irish artists without mentioning Charles J Haughey is like staging Hamlet without the prince.’ This reminded me of a prize-giving event that took place in the Sugar Club about fifteen years ago. It was addressed by the poet Anthony Cronin, who had been adviser to Charles Haughey. Cronin pointed out to the assembled artists, worthy people all, that they probably did not have the courage to thank Charles Haughey in public for all he did for the arts.

‘What you should all do,’ Cronin said, ‘is go home and slip into a room on your own and turn off the lights and raise a glass to Haughey in the dark. No one will ever know. It is the least he deserves.’ 

It is clear that the many initiatives in which Haughey was involved made a difference, not least the tax-free status for artists and Aosdána. 

What is curious about the tax-free status was how few outsiders took advantage of it. In the 1990s I discussed this with a few English writers, some of whom were beginning to make a good deal of money. Why not come to Ireland and live tax-free? It’s just an hour’s flight away! 

For all of them, Ireland was an unknown territory. When Irish people spoke, these people tended to miss the joke. The politics in the Republic made no sense. And English people could not understand how class worked in Ireland. And then trying to find schools for English-born children in Dublin, with everyone warning you about the iniquities of Christian Brothers schools even with the Brothers gone, or what an appalling institution was Gonzaga College or Blackrock or some other distinguished school. 

Or realizing that the two big hospitals in Dublin were owned and run by nuns, but no one had ever seen the sisters in question and no one even knew their names. And since they didn’t wear their habits, then you wouldn’t even recognize a nun even if, ominously, she began to make her way along a corridor towards you. 

‘Can you, or can you not, get condoms?’ these English writers were heard to wail. ‘And tell me again what you call the police in Ireland? And who or what is Fiona Flail? Is it really the name of your main political party?’ 

The support for artists in Ireland made a difference, however, to Irish artists. Producing a novel or a body of paintings, say, every few years carries with it worries and risks. An exhibition, no matter how good, might not sell. A novel could get bad reviews and poor sales - even a novel that is a masterpiece. (In fact, this is more likely to happen to a masterpiece.) Anyone who has been in the company of a painter, in Dublin for a show, who has to travel back to rural Ireland without a single painting sold and settle down to a few years’ work without any income knows what I am talking about.

Also, if an artist has a commercial success, it may be one in a lifetime, making the income for one year far higher than the years around, with the tax authorities having no interest in working out an average income over, say, five years.

This means that the tax-free status, Aosdána and the Arts Council Bursary system and indeed the acquisition of paintings for the Arts Council collection made a difference. 

As did the support for literary magazines. In Anthony Cronin’s book ‘Dead as Doornails’, there is a wonderful account of the poet Patrick Kavanagh’s relationship in the 1950s to The Bell magazine where Cronin was an editor. Cronin offered the poet a fee on the spot every time he produced a new poem that the magazine would publish. This gave Kavanagh the sort of lift that any writer might recognize. He didn’t write the poems for the money, but the idea that there was someone (Cronin) and something (a fee) waiting for him gave him energy and spurred him on to try and finish the poem.

I think having a story accepted for a magazine lifts the spirits in the same way, makes you feel that maybe you should think of writing more or completing a few half-finished stories. 

Recently, in an interview in the Observer in London, Thomas Morris, one of the very few citizens of our neighbouring island who has ever become an honorary citizen of literary Dublin – he should be given a knighthood - was asked about the success of the Stinging Fly. He replied: ‘There’s a tendency in Britain to go, ah, aren’t the Irish great with their oral storytelling tradition, as if that’s where [the success] comes from. It’s hard work. One thread of the magazine’s history in the 25 years since it was set up is the growth of the Arts Council [of Ireland] in that time. In Britain, the arts are still up for question – like, should we support them? Whereas in Ireland it feels like they’re important, a priority – we’re going to support them. If I’m a writer in Wales wanting to send out work, where do I go? In Ireland, I could send it to the Dublin Review, Banshee, Gorse, the Tangerine, the Stinging Fly. More and more writers from Britain look to get their start here because there aren’t necessarily those outlets in the UK.’ 

If state support gives rise to good writing, could this formula be exported? If other small countries asked us to design a literary movement of the future for them, would Ireland be able to offer a blueprint? Can we bottle it? 

Perhaps there is one ingredient that you could not easily export. It may be that we have much more to thank Charles Haughey and his fellow politicians for than mere state subvention. We owe them a debt of gratitude for creating a country that made no sense, for using a rhetoric that was often far from reality. 

Debt itself is a good example. When he became Taoiseach, Haughey promised to deal with excess public spending. He even went on tv for a special broadcast. He looked like he meant business. And then he set about increasing public spending enormously. He was replaced by Garret FitzGerald who promised to obliterate the need for any deficit at all in public spending and proceeded over the next four years to double the national debt.

In this period, those who were invisible remained so. The Irish people, it was agreed, would never accept abortion. There was a referendum in 1983 to enshrine the ban on abortion in the Constitution. After the referendum, the number of women seeking abortions in England actually increased in line with other European countries.

So, too, with homosexuals. When Garret FitzGerald launched his Constitutional Crusade in the early 1980s, he mentioned all kinds of minorities. But not us. When I went down to the Four Courts to attend the hearings in David Norris’s efforts to have the Victorian laws against homosexuality declared unconstitutional, there were no newspaper reporters there, just a court stenographer. The public galleries were almost empty. There was an eerie feeling that something important was happening, enough for it not to seem like that. 

When the case arrived at the European Court of Human Rights, the Irish government told the court that they didn’t need to change the law because they didn’t use it. Just as homosexuals were invisible, so too the laws against them were virtual.

It was hard not to laugh. 

In 1980, when the new contraceptive laws came in, I was starting in journalism and I had a tremendous time, first for In Dublin and then for the Sunday Tribune. Since only doctors could prescribe condoms, then I could visit their surgeries and waste their august time seeing what they would say when I asked them to write an actual prescription for a condom. And then take it to a chemist shop. One shop in Cork nearly threw me in the Lee when I showed up with my prescription.

All this was part of an enormous gap between private and public life in Ireland. In other, earlier decades this great divide must have also been intense, but in the 1980s there were more ways of drawing attention to it: Irish radio had become sharper, as had the Irish Times. And there were magazines like ‘In Dublin’ and ‘Magill.’

It was as though every private story, the actual shape of every life and every family were not just secret or hidden. They were invisible, they had no public manifestations. Someone was singing but there was no sound. It was as if all the mirrors had been taken away and there was just bare wall.

This meant that the publication of some books and the performance of some plays in the 1990’s made a strange difference: John McGahern’s ‘Amongst Women’, say, or the poetry of Eavan Boland, or the productions of Garry Hynes, or Dermot Bolger’s ‘The Journey Home’, or the poetry of Paul Durcan.

But it wasn’t just the literature that dealt directly and openly with the truth of how we lived that made an unusual difference. Other books too: the novels of John Banville, the poems of Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, the plays of Tom Murphy, Frank McGuinness and Marina Carr, had the power to transform language, to handle words with responsibility or with a deliberate and brilliant form of irresponsibility. In that time, a well-made novel or play or poem stood for something beyond the realm of art.

Books mattered then because so little else that we heard was true. Writers grew up sensing not only the silence all around, but the effort to envelop reality in a kind of numb, passionless (or even worse, passionate) rhetoric.

Often, if you wanted truth, you went to its opposite. For example, both Charles Haughey and Garret FitzGerald in the early 1980’s made elaborate overtures to young people in their speeches. Young people were always, according to them, our greatest national asset. Soon, I understood that this meant something entirely different from what it said. It meant that by the end of the Eighties, fifty thousand young people a year would leave Ireland looking for work. And everybody, it seemed to me, understood the hidden meanings in the words the politicians used.

I began to notice that if you put the word ‘not’ in the sentences used in public life in Ireland which did not already have it and deleted the ‘not’ in the sentences which did, then you would get a much clearer view of what was going on.

I had always been puzzled by the overwhelming support in the referendum of 1972 for the deletion of sections of Article 44 of the Irish Constitution. The main section read: ‘The state recognises the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church as the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of the citizens.’ It was deleted by 721,003 votes to 133,430. In the Eighties I realised that it was deleted because it was true. Therefore, it did not need to be said.

Indeed, most things in the Irish Constitution were simply not true. For example: the Irish language, according to the Constitution, ‘is the first official language’. Add ‘not’ and you enter the real world. Or: ‘The State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’ The state recognises no such thing.

These are just some small examples.

And this world in which so much was invisible, unmentionable and downright untrue inspired young women and men to write down some words that led to other words that led to books that were like a lantern or a spiked stick, that were like raising a flag up over a place. They told a new kind of story, using a new sort of style; they put the very thing that seemed most disturbing then - a single sensibility – on display. They had a way of seeing the world that was uncompromising, or even innocent, or filled with knowingness and playfulness.

They wrote as though they were telling a secret, as though they were treading on forbidden territory, as though the world would not be the same again when their book was finished. They wrote as though style is a kind of substance, and style will hit the nervous system more than plot, and the battle the images wage takes place in the nervous system or the imagination, and only afterwards in what we might call the intelligence. This is how we should read recent novels by Eimear McBride, Mike McCormack and Claire Keegan. And this is how we should consider these new novels that are on the Booker longlist.

No one in Ireland writes about the nation, because the very notion of a nation was constructed to mislead. But some writers realize that an ordinary well-made sentence, or even a brilliant sentence, can transform the reader, and perhaps for a moment it even could cast a spell, and that might be enough.

In a time when you learned not to trust a word you heard, the impulse to see if you could make a mirror or create a sound for the song became intense in Ireland. The subventions and state support helped. It paid the piper.

But the tune itself came from a deeper source.

Colm Tóibín (August 2023)